Compassion has long been considered a major virtue by most religions and it underpins much of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. What we call the ‘Golden Rule’ was known as long ago as the third millennium BCE. We began the session by considering the recent work of Karen Armstrong. Compassion is the focus of an organisation – the Council of Conscience – that she founded following her talk on winning the TED Prize (Technology Entertainment Design) in 2008. The key document of the Council is a ‘Charter for Compassion’ (See the Charter website at – http://charterforcompassion.org .) In 2010 Armstrong followed this up with a book Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.
We decided that compassion was not synonymous with ‘pity’ but is the virtue that we practise when our feelings of empathy lead us to put aside self-interest and ‘walk in the shoes of others’. We admitted that we are more inclined to have compassion for family and friends other people we know and people who are ‘like us’. We are less inclined to have compassion for people we don’t know and people who are distant anonymous or members of a large amorphous group. Thus we might have considerable compassion for our Korean friend Sang-mi Kim when she has migraine but have little for the millions of faceless ‘North Koreans’ who the radio tells us are starving. It was agreed that it was our duty to be more open to compassion by ensuring we were well-informed about current political and social issues.
Some of us felt that one condition for having compassion for other people was that we first have compassion for ourselves though others did not think that ‘compassion’ was the appropriate term here. A reasonable feeling of self-worth perhaps? It was also argued that we should not feel undue guilt for our relatively comfortable lives. While it may be our duty to take action we need to keep a sense of perspective when assessing our level of responsibility for the inequalities of the world and our capacity to make a real difference.
Finally we considered some specific types of people in Australia needing our compassion at present: homeless youth the disabled Aborigines and ‘Boat People’. It was agreed that a common barrier to action with regard to groups like these is the tendency to ‘blame the victim’ for their plight. An everyday context in which people showed lack of compassion some suggested was in conversation where the less confident and assertive could be ‘talked down’. This was an often unacknowledged cause of pain within families workplaces and among friends. It would never happen in a SoFiA function.